Intheir new book, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, McKinsey & Company strategy lead- ers Chris Bradley and Sven Smit address how companies can conquer the human side
of the strategy room, so that bold moves and real
growth can happen. The authors studied the performance of over 2,400 of the world’s largest companies over a ten-year period to find out what factors
in a corporate strategy move the needle on performance, including: How human behaviors in the
strategy room can foil even the smartest strategies;
How companies can calibrate and shift the odds of
success for a strategy; and, Why strategy success
depends on a steady drumbeat of big moves. Anyone in the strategy room will be equipped to change
the way they evaluate strategies to result in the best
possible outcomes. Consulting caught up with Bradley and Smit to discuss the social side of strategy,
big moves and how to tilt the odds for exceptional
performance into your favor.

Consulting: Congratulations on the book. So, talk to me alittle bit about the origins of the book. What do you hopethe book brings to the conversations around strategy? Inshort, why this book now?

Bradley: The book was basically the collision of two
worlds—the first was big data, probability, the power
curve, which we’ll go into later, and really what actually drives corporate success. But then what we did
was bring it into another world, which was the lived
experience of executives actually trying to get strategy done. Our book was kind of born where those
two worlds are crashing into each other. Instead of
providing framework and case studies, we spent five
years doing empirical research on the world’s largest

2,400 companies, covering 127 industry sectors and
62 countries, and their performance over a ten-year
period. We wanted to find out what really impacts
long-term performance. What we found are 10 levers
that are the strongest determinants of your odds of
success out of 40 variables we examined.

Consulting: So, how does the influx of all this data im-pact the discussion around strategy? That’s the gamechanger, right?

Smit: In most companies, strategy is sort of an annual process. Leaders aim to keep it short and brief
and issue focused. But that process is not very conducive to planning strategy, it’s more conducive to
setting a budget or a financial plan. The frustration
with the strategy process is very high. If all strategy
plans were certain, you would just approve them and
move on. But there are far more agendas in the strategy room than just developing a strategy: budgets are
being negotiated, resources are being protected, and
jobs and promotions are on the line. The process is
clouded by self-interest, internal policies and biases.
We call this the social side of strategy. It’s that tension between the conversation that’s happening and
the data that might be, in our mind, the solution to
changing the dynamics in the strategy room.

Consulting: So, what can companies—or what shouldcompanies—do to move the needle?

Smit: We write in the book that we’re not introducing a
new framework. Many strategy concepts were frameworks; we’re not doing that. Our book talks about, and
others have talked about, the biases in our brains. If
you confront the biases in our brains and our decision
making with the data, you can see why the data suggests when all those biases are at play. We discovered,